1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony communications contact services and pertains particularly to a system and methods for soliciting and activating remote service workers to service contact center business.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of telephony contact servicing, call centers are employed to handle various types of customer care and servicing. State-of-the-art call centers are more appropriately termed multimedia contact centers because many centers are now digital media service centers employing data network telephony (DNT) technologies, Web services, short message services (SMS) chat, instant messaging, video conferencing, email, e-fax, and so on.
Multimedia contact centers employ service agents who individually or as part of an agent group service customers of one or more enterprises. In-house agents typically are connected to a configuration server via a local area network (LAN) and are tracked when they are logged in to the system so that their activities are monitored. Agents typically operate at agent stations and employ laptops or desktop systems, IP telephones, plain old telephony service (POTS) telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), paging systems and other types of communications devices when servicing clients.
Depending on the flexibility of a service center, agents may be configured dynamically into virtual agent groups where, within groups, agents may be monitored for state of activity. Agents may be dynamically re-configured into other groups depending on the needs of the service center.
Although workflow engines and dynamic resource allocation are available within a state-of-art service center, there may be times during business activity when there is a lot of traffic and time-to-answer (TTA) for any one group of agents is running very high. At peak periods there may be significant estimated wait time (EWT) for an agent resulting in high customer frustration, which in turn can lead to call abandonment, lost service opportunities and other problems.
Some enterprises utilize third-party contact services that may kick in during peak periods or at planned intervals to help lessen the load on enterprise agents, reduce wait time and improve service objectives overall. Professional third-party services can be expensive and can be difficult to manage in terms of unifying service level objectives, managing incoming call loads and so on.
It has occurred to the inventors that there are many individuals who may have sufficient skills and other qualifications to act a customer service representatives or technical representatives in a variety of fields for an enterprise with little or no training requirements. Many of these potential resources are not currently utilizing those skills for one reason or another. It has also occurred to the inventors that with the general advances made in communications technology, many of these individuals and ad hoc groups of skilled persons possess adequate communications equipment and have access to high-bandwidth infrastructure and networks.
Therefore, what is needed in the art is a system and methods for making use of loosely configured groups of remote workers to service enterprise customers at least during times of need for the enterprise. A system such as this could save time and expense for an enterprise and provide opportunity to those who have certain skills.